


day by day

by mutterandmumble



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Anxiety, Developing Friendships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Language, Senpai-Kouhai Relationship, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:47:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23362684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: In which Yachi has a very bad day, and Tanaka is a very good friend.
Relationships: Tanaka Ryuunosuke & Yachi Hitoka
Comments: 19
Kudos: 51





	day by day

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for physical descriptors of anxiety, other references to anxiety/social anxiety, and general feelings of disconnect
> 
> I’m not all that happy with this, especially because it’s not the most coherent, but that was at least in part intentional so I decided that I was happy enough. I started this around a month ago after having a very bad couple of days and wanting to write a self-indulgent vent fic, and then I wrote like two other fics before coming back to it. I finished it largely because I had already done a _ton_ of editing and I’m really not doing much else right now.
> 
> That said, I hope you enjoy!!

Thursday afternoon finds Yachi Hitoka drawing.

She’s nervous-drawing, to be exact, because her day has been very fast and loose with its teeth, sharp against her soft-sallow skin, and now that all is through and she’s been left for dead it takes every bit of her concentration to keep herself in one piece. Drawing has always helped with that- made things a little easier to bear, made the back of her throat taste a little less sour, helped with the bursts of excitement or unease that leave her reeling. And she’s certainly been sent spinning off into space, head over heels, arms pinwheeling in an anxiety-driven burst of energy as she’s shot into the void; her stomach feels like it’s quivering, her bottom lip has been caught tight between her teeth for the past hour, and her legs jitter in one-two-one-twos as her soul untethers from her body and flies into the great unknown.

Yachi Hitoka is intimately aware of how she ended up here, because Yachi Hitoka is as wide-eyed and vigilant as they come. She was very happy earlier- she had stood on the sidelines of Karasuno’s practice, hands fisted in the hem of her shirt, and watched as Hinata fumbled his way through a serve, tongue sticking from the side of his mouth and legs bent  _ way too much, dumbass  _ according to Kageyama. This was a standard practice; one in a line of the many standard practices of her day, from her waking up in the morning, to packing her lunch before she left, to buying coffee from the vending machine when practice wore itself to a break. The coffee in particular was deathly important; Yachi hinges her day around set routines, ones that are so integral that they’re as much a limb to her as any arm or leg, and vending-machine coffee is an absolute staple of her Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

It had been a good coffee too, because it’s a Thursday and as Thursdays are so otherwise unremarkable, Thursdays are her splurge days. She’d gone for the  _ expensive  _ brand, with the vanilla flavoring, and as always it was  _ really  _ good so (as always) she drank it  _ really  _ fast, but not fast  _ enough _ apparently because practice started up again before she finished. Now this was uncommon but not alarming, and familiar territory still, so in the interest of preserving the sanctity of Thursday Coffee, Yachi wheedled permission from Suga and then stood outside the gym to finish the can off. Easy, easy, easy. 

Easy as it was she  _ was  _ on edge, teetering back and forth on her feet and hissing air through her teeth, because Yachi is high-strung as far as people go. She feels often that her fingers must be made of guitar strings or rubber bands or something equivalent, because her muscles wind up and wind tight and often when people speak to her she feels like every single one is tensing down sharp as can be around her bones. This phenomenon is one of the essential things that make up Yachi Hitoka- if routine comprises her arms and legs, then edgy agitation is what twists her head to the side, melds her fingers into each other and reduces her to a big blob every other day. It’s a part of a ritual she’s used to, and one that she is an unwilling participant in, but it’s as glaringly familiar as anything else so she puts up with it. Nerves, agitation and all, it was business as usual as she tapped at the condensation on her coffee can, a good step or two outside the gym (she wouldn’t dare bring it inside, not even when Suga said she could if she wanted to) and with all sorts of good feelings swirling through her head, leaving her woozy and contented like a cat lapping up the sun.

So naturally when disaster struck it rattled her straight to her core.  _ Disaster  _ was a single stray ball- it came rocketing out from the gym and before she could even turn her head-  _ bam! Bam!  _ It knocked her expensive Thursday Coffee right out of her hand and onto her sweater-vest. The sweater-vest of her  _ school uniform.  _ The sweater-vest of her  _ school uniform  _ that she had to wear all through the rest of the day and that now had a big splotch of (expensive) Thursday Coffee splattered all over its front, staining the fabric dark and smelling faintly of vanilla.

And that was the crash-bang beginning of the end for Yachi Hitoka, whose day delved from there into a pool of  _ too much  _ variance  _ much too  _ quickly, especially for a person who trends towards unease as she does. She aced her math test and the excitement of that overshadowed the misfortune of the still soiled shirt, but then someone bumped  _ hard  _ into her in the hallways and she’d gone sprawling- books  _ everywhere, everywhere,  _ all over the floor- and then she’d managed to finish off that essay for literature but then she  _ forgot  _ the textbook questions for chemistry, and- 

Her day has been a set of very high highs and very low lows and she’s  _ sick  _ of it now. For all of her tendencies towards nerves and very overt, plain expression of them, Yachi is a predictable person; she knows what will set her off, knows the easy ways that her insides work, knows the sorts of things that will make her face feel like it’s crumbling up and those which will soothe the sensation to some degree. It’s a tooth-nail-claw sort of thing, where she’s thrashing around wildly for any measure of control over a set of variables very unyielding and very unpredictable by nature; it’s like trying to herd cats, or funnel emotion through a paper straw. Inefficient, ineffective, but with an outcome that comes as no real surprise to anyone. Yachi’s world likes to press down on her, right on the chest right above her heart, but she’s learned to strike back with the little arsenal she’s taken up since she realized that she does (on occasion) have a fighting chance.

So the minute that the last bell rang she’d packed herself up and stumbled fast from the building, hunched over sideways to hide the stain on her shirt and breaking her back with the weight of her books because she put them all into her bag after her earlier incident. She was angry; so angry that it felt like her insides were made of glass, and so dull-eyed and dangerous that she didn’t say a word about it. Rather she took herself (and all her heat and sharpness and heft) and lugged down to the quietest spot that she knew of- a shady grove, tucked into itself and reserved for the fair few desperate enough to choke through its thick clouds of dust and neglect. She still had time before afternoon practice came bearing down on her and brought with it a swarm of much too eager, much too loud high school boys, and she intended to make the most of it; she was growing antsy, prickly in her skin, and wanted to see if she couldn’t force herself back in line by means of other, stricter lines.

And so now she’s drawing. At the one sad picnic table, the one hidden deep beneath the trees and made of seedy old wood, sagging deep on one side and swirled through with the warped proof of its age. Someone carved their initials into the lower left corner long, long ago; someone else picked a scoop of wood from right next to them, neat as can be, and someone else still chipped into the space below that with something that left scores of thin, straight lines. Yachi keeps her palms down, fingers extended through her joints, moves with a set of very careful, very controlled movements as she hopes that the wind will be kind to her today. Her hair has stayed flat against her scalp, her jacket firmly situated over her shoulders and sides, so she clings to the last strings of her optimism as she sketches the stiff-straight-strict lines that compose Karasuno.

Her heart’s not in it, because her heart’s busy clogging up her throat. The heat’s becoming oppressive too, the stench of sunlight rolling through her mouth like a hard candy and leaving her throat dry enough to stick together when she swallows. Her lungs flutter and she sniffles lightly as she goes for another line, careless as she runs her hand through the motions- this one comes out too harsh, thick with crumbling graphite and smearing down over the windows of the nearly-done third floor. Yachi hisses through her teeth (exhales through her nose, pounds her fists against the table) and sets about erasing the offending curve from what was otherwise shaping up to be a not all that bad sketch. Now though there’s a swatch of lead bumbling down over the roof, the stray bits of rubber from the eraser are stuck into her skin, and she’s right back where she started. She should have used one of her pens instead. She should have remembered to do all of her homework. She should have watched where she was going in the hallway, done a bit worse on that math test, stood a step to the side in front of the gym-

“Hey, Yacchan!”

Yachi’s head whips to the side, locked and loaded and ready to listen. Her name is sharpened to static by the buzz of a voice but it’s definitely a  _ name,  _ the sort you would use to address a person, and she doesn’t like that because it’s far too strange to think of herself as a whole  _ person  _ right now, one with a face with arms and legs, because at heart she feels like nothing more than the vague concept of worry-fueled distress. But the vague concept of worry-fueled distress doesn’t have a name yet- she’s thinking Steve, or maybe Asahi- and her own name is being called clear and bold through the clearing, clean like the ring of a bell, so she must indeed be a person. Arms and legs, body and soul, hair and hate and all. 

Strange. She scrubs at her misplaced line once more, harder this time, just to give her newly human hands something to do.

Then she looks up because if her name was called then that probably means that someone was  _ calling  _ it and she should probably acknowledge that someone before they have to call her  _ again  _ and things get awkward. So she looks up, head moving in a controlled set of zigzags until she sees the source of her broken reverie, who is jogging towards her with his jacket flapping open behind him and one hand raised high in the air. His hair is cropped close to his head, eyes wide enough that she can see straight through them- he’s got tan skin and dark black shorts, a stubborn set to his shoulders and a thick white scar over his elbow that she can’t see but  _ knows _ is there from long days spent in close proximity. His sneakers are a tough gray canvas, the same color and make as the dirt, his shoelaces are frayed, he’s picking at his nails, and his teeth don’t glint in the sun but it’s a near thing.

Alright.

Or not alright because by  _ all _ rights, Tanaka is the  _ last  _ person that she thought she would see right now. Yachi had half-expected, half-dreaded that some other member of the team, like Suga or maybe Kiyoko, would come seek her out, but Tanaka? They don’t speak much beyond the surface level. She doesn’t even know his favorite color. She was beginning to think that he wouldn’t be caught  _ dead  _ around her.

But regardless of how strange it is, it’s Tanaka approaching her and Tanaka alone, with nothing but negative space glued to his side; he’s  _ so _ alone in fact that Yachi decides it must be pointed, like waving a white flag or keeping his hands palm-up or the whisper-quiet voice that people use when they talk to her, like they worry she’ll jump out of her skin if they’re too loud. He’s giving her a smile too, not the scary one where he scrunches his face up and lets the points of his teeth show past the roll of his bottom lip, but rather a disarming grin that reaches all the way up to his eyes and crinkles the skin around his mouth. She likes that smile. Yachi likes it when people are nice to her. But she doesn’t know why Tanaka is here, and nice as he may be (to her, to their teammates, to others too no matter how much he denies it), Yachi has had a  _ very bad day  _ and Yachi is not sure that she can navigate… club matters, or relationship advice, or whatever it may be that Tanaka is wanting from her right now. 

“I’ve been lookin’ all over for you! Really, fucking  _ all over.  _ I was under the stairs two minutes ago.”

Words again. Not  _ good  _ ones, too open-ended for that, but strong. She might not  _ know  _ Tanaka the way that she knows Hinata or Kageyama or the back of her hand, but she likes him well enough and that’s vital regarding how she’s going to interact with him. She can’t find it in herself to be mean or confrontational or  _ anything  _ like that to  _ anyone _ , much less people she  _ likes _ , much less people like  _ Tanaka _ who’s got his hands on his hips and looks pleased as all fuck that he managed to track her down. The wind ruffles through her hair, slides rough over her shoulders before slithering through the edges of her paper, and her luck has really worn itself down to nothing, hasn’t it?

“Shit, it’s dark over here,” Tanaka mumbles, more to himself than her but loud enough to kill her inner monologue anyways. He starts saying something else, but Yachi’s still stuck in her interrupted thoughts; She‘ll have to mourn the loss of them later, in excruciating detail because she was really onto something for a little while there. Maybe she'll see if she can revive the same feeling, the same general themes of them when she’s alone again and can think clearly and is not supposed to be paying attention to-  _ shit. _

“- took forever but I finally fucking  _ found _ you! You’re kinda hard to track down, you know. Probably ‘cause you’re so small _. _ ”

Oh, Yachi caught none of that and Tanaka caught on to  _ that.  _ His pitch black and see-through eyes are focused on her even as he rambles- they’re  _ assessing _ , she realizes, because during morning practice she had gone quiet and blank, and the thing about letting your eyes glaze over and your mouth glue itself shut around people that you spend a good two, three, four hours with a day is that you can try as hard as you’d like, but  _ someone  _ is going to pick up on it. And then they’ll pick up on the rest (and the rest and the rest), tuck all the evidence of a day gone wrong into their pockets and then sew them shut until the weight drags them down, down, down to the center of the earth.

“But it takes more than a few minutes of searching to take me down! I’m  _ way  _ tougher than that! And since I’m here, I’m gonna sit. That alright?” 

He finishes his speech triumphant and bold, like a trumpet or a bell. They both know that she wasn’t listening, but Tanaka seems so  _ confident,  _ and bright enough and brave enough that Yachi finds herself nodding before she realizes it, head bobbing up and down like a balloon on a string.

“ _Fuck_ yeah,” Tanaka crows. Then he plops right down across from her. He’s rough with it, slinging his legs beneath the table hard enough that his knees bump up and rattle the whole thing, and his sneaker scuffs against the dirt with a _skritch_ that has Yachi’s insides shuddering. He doesn’t sit still, because Tanaka Ryuunosuke can do many things including down an energy drink in thirty seconds flat and reach high shelves in a way that Yachi can only dream of, but sitting still is not one of them. Yachi finds that she doesn’t mind; the easy back-and-forth of his shoulders and the tapping of his fingertips against the table is actually kind of relaxing. She likes that he keeps to a rhythm. If she wanted to, she could count it off on her fingers. 

“So,” Tanaka starts (solid enough. She’s started conversations the same way before herself). The wind blows through the trees. The sky is very blue, and Yachi Hitoka feels like half her heart is pounding up and through her throat. Maybe once it leaves her behind Tanaka will put it into his pocket, next to her spoiled coffee and spilled books, and then he’ll sink to the center of the earth and leave her all alone with her halfhearted sketches in the grove behind the school, stuck stone-still and centered in the haze of her bad day.

“So,” she echoes softly, after a beat passes and her heart stays put. Then she winces, because though it would be entirely out of character for Tanaka to think so, there’s always that tiny, terrifying possibility that he’ll think she’s mocking him and then leave her alone forever to be slowly consumed by the roots of the Big Tree, the one right by the picnic table that’s bigger than her or her bad day or the sky. That’s what she’s afraid of. That’s what worst-case-scenario, monster-Tanaka would do.

Now because Tanaka in real life is nothing like the worst-case-scenario, monster-Tanaka that had forced its way into her head, he does not rip her to shreds with his teeth or leave her to die a terrible death but instead reaches out to tap near her hand.

“Did you draw that?” he asks. Yachi blinks.

“Um,” she says. 

Yachi thinks that it’s fairly obvious that she  _ did,  _ in fact, draw that, but she can’t say so because she likes Tanaka and she doesn’t like confrontation. All she  _ can  _ do is stay silent and start to worry (and worry and worry and-) because there’s something about people looking at her unfinished art that she finds completely, utterly  _ terrifying.  _ She always manages to convince herself that if the observer in question sees one line out of line, then they’ll decide that she’s really not worth much at all and dedicate the rest of their lives to squashing her like a bug. It’s a very sound bit of logic;  _ that _ , at least, she’s confident about. 

And the  _ logical  _ thing to assume from that first  _ logical  _ thing she assumed is that Tanaka hates her now because he saw her drawing and it was not perfect. So she braces herself for the inevitable (and logical! Still logical!) rejection, which knowing Tanaka will be as explosive and involved as her beginning of the end. Whatever disgust he’s going to express will probably hurt like a volleyball to the head; his anger will fit the pattern of her day, the bad-good-bad-good and now  _ bad _ , so she really should have seen this coming. Next time she  _ will _ . 

If she doesn't die here first.

“It’s really good,” Tanaka says once it becomes clear she’s not saying anything else. And  _ there it is, there it is,  _ the long anticipated and thoroughly dreaded- validation? Compliment? 

“I mean I knew that you were good because you did that thing for the club, but like, other than that, this is good too,” Tanaka continues, rambling through the ends of his sentences and blurring each word into the next. He nods.  _ End of discussion,  _ he’s trying to say;  _ It’s really good.  _ Yachi idly notes that he’s talking like she does when she thinks she’s offended someone. That snaps her back into herself, tugs at her rubberband consciousness enough to earn a response.

“Thank you?” she eeps out through her surprise. Her brain has stopped. The sky is blue and blank, like the inside of her head, and she hopes that some freak hurricane will come blowing through right now at this very moment if only so that she’ll have an excuse to get herself out of here. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Tanaka continues. His speech has gotten more natural, running itself down in the rough-and-tumble way that he favors and Yachi has come to know. He seems more confident too now that she’s answered, confident enough that Yachi feels some of her wariness slip from her shoulders and slink down to her ankles instead, letting her breathe until the next minor inconvenience gives it purpose again. “It’s  _ really _ good! And you have to believe me because I’m your super awesome senpai, right?”

“Right,” Yachi replies faintly. He’s being  _ very  _ nice and she’s now ninety percent sure now that he’s only talking with her because he’s concerned, but is that all? Does he want a favor? Is he going to want her to draw something for him? She’s not sure that she can do that. 

“Now you might not know this Yacchan, but I’m a pretty damn good artist myself.”

Tanaka has settled fully into himself now, smiling with teeth bared like they’re getting to the meat of things, or the reason that he’s here anyways. Yachi perks up. She lets her eyes flicker upwards to settle on the bridge of Tanka’s nose. She  _ didn’t  _ know that- she didn’t know that, but she does quite like learning things, especially about other people, and especially when learning those things means that she’s not being left to rot on the battered old picnic table by the Big Tree, or being asked to draw… well, she doesn’t know  _ what  _ exactly Tanaka would want her to draw if he asked. Himself, maybe? That’s a popular one. Or a volleyball. A volleyball court. 

“Really?” she gasps out, vaguely breathy. Still nervous, but she’d be nervous regardless of who was on the other end of this conversation, and at least now the attention is shifting away from her. 

“Yeah, definitely. Here, do ya mind if I-“ he gestures to one of the blank sheets of paper that lies near Yachi’s elbow. She pushes it over to him, careful to keep her hand posed far enough above the picnic table that there’s no danger of splinters. She pats the paper once she’s got it in place and then immediately regrets it because that was a subconscious movement and those are  _ embarrassing. _

“Here,” she says to try and assuage some of that bad feeling. Then she realizes that that’s redundant, and scrambles for something else to follow. “I have tinted paper too. Or stationary. I brought some in for a project that we did in Literature and I think I have a few extra pieces that you can use if you want.”

Tanaka snorts and her heart stops dead, which is actually a bit of a relief because it was beginning to get annoying. “Ah don’t worry about that Yacchan,” he says. “Believe me, I don’t need anything  _ fancy _ to work my magic. This’ll be fine. This and maybe like a pencil or something.”

He sounds very confident. Confident enough that Yachi’s a bit starstruck as she carefully peruses the collection of pens and pencils she’s got set out, looking for one that she’s willing to let another person use. Tanaka must be  _ very  _ good if he’s so confident- that’s how these things work! Maybe he’ll give her some tips once he’s shown off a bit. Tanaka would probably like it very much if she asked, and she’s not beyond a little flattery for personal gain, especially if that flattery is hard-earned and well-deserved. 

She settles on one of her medium-quality black pens and passes it over, hair on end and jittery excitement tugging her to the edge of her seat. Tanaka gives her a half-salute in thanks and then immediately gets to work, face stern in the way of someone who obviously knows what they’re doing and demeanor practically  _ oozing  _ competence. Yachi watches on in anticipation as he scribbles, free hand curled around his work in such a way that she can’t catch even the smallest glimpse. Tanaka has nice hands- rough around the edges, skin picked at and fingertips calloused from all of the practice that he does. Yachi wonders if he’d let her draw them. Then she thinks that thoughts like that never did anyone good, and that the more that she thinks about it she’s very on the fence about thoughts overall, so if she really wanted to do herself some good she’d just stop thinking entirely- all at once and with one big bang.

And if she were to stop thinking entirely, all at once and with one big bang, then she’d want that one big bang to be  _ big,  _ like the Big Tree, right? So then if she only had one last thought left in her, or if she were made to think of just one thing for the rest of her life, what would it be? 

Well she doesn’t know. She’s nervous right now, and Tanaka is  _ still  _ drawing (as to be expected, because he’s very good and being very good takes time) so she’s letting her brain ramble and prattle and rumble on in every direction. If this is anything to go by, she imagines that her last (big bang) thought would probably be terror and nothing else. Good, old-fashioned terror. The kind that eats away at your insides until-

“All done! Now are you sure you’re ready for this?”

Yachi starts, surprised. She’d nearly forgotten that Tanaka was there, busy as she was facing down another one of her tangential monologues, and now that he’s torn her from herself for the umpteenth time today, she thinks reflexively that she is _not_ _at all_ ready for this. An appropriate last thought. 

Mutely, she nods. Tanaka keeps his hand over his drawing for second, waggling his eyebrows and drawing out the suspense until Yachi feels near to breaking. “Aaaannnddd,” he drawls, “ _ Bam! _ ”

He removes his hand to reveal… the shakiest stick figure that Yachi has ever seen. It’s got stars scribbled over the two lines that make up its hair, a smile that nearly travels off the side of the egg-shaped head and a body bent like a tree branch, and- she can’t help it. A little snort of laughter trickles out from her mouth. Immediately she’s horrified, clapping a hand over the whole bottom half of her face with enough force to kill, but Tanaka  _ still  _ has that ridiculous expression plastered all over his face and now that he sees she’s laughing he’s playing it up even  _ more,  _ flexing and fake-bowing and preening.

“I know, I know Yacchan. I fuckin’ know. _ Look  _ at it. Look at the linework. We gotta get this shit into a museum, we gotta get it into the fucking  _ Louvre- _ “

Yachi laughs harder. She laughs so hard that her stomach takes up a dull ache and starts roiling around, that her legs feel weak and her face goes red. Her muscles seize up and her arms are circled around her stomach as they try to reign her back in. Maybe she’s going to suffocate right here, beneath the Big Tree, with tears prickling through her eyes and thinking of nothing but the way her chest seized up and her heart went  _ thump thump thump  _ when Tanaka showed her his drawing. Maybe she’s going to sit here laughing right up until the heat death of the universe, resigned in the way of a person who has started to laugh and then realized that they maybe shouldn’t be laughing and then decided  _ fuck it,  _ it’s even more awkward if they stop now so the best thing to do is just laugh, laugh, laugh until they bleed their lungs dry. 

“Monet  _ who,  _ Leonardo da whatever the  _ fuck,  _ it’s all Tanaka Ryuunoske now! Best artist in the whole fucking  _ world- _ “

“The universe,” Yachi interrupts through her giggling.

He snaps once, shooting her two sharp finger guns. “I like the way you think! Best artist in the whole  _ universe! _ I always knew you were smart but this is just a whole ‘nother level, lemme tell you. You keep thinking like that and you’re gonna get  _ real  _ far, I know it.”

She nods, hand raised to her mouth still in an attempt to curb the laughter. She fails. The wind is still blowing but it’s soft and sweet, warm like the sun or her face or the feeling prickling at her skull. Warm like the universe, or her thoughts, most of which are too big for her body. That’s a problem when her day is bending itself into thirteen different shapes, bulging into  _ good  _ spikes and  _ bad  _ spikes and  _ coffee stained  _ spikes, or when she’s thirty seconds strong into something unfamiliar and realizes that there’s thirty ways (strong) that it can go wrong, or when she’s otherwise preoccupied with the heat death of the universe (which suddenly seems like a very present and pressing issue) but sometimes-

Sometimes people are nice to her (or concerned for her, which she can tell through their big, bold voices and see-through eyes) and she can let her thoughts go loose and rapid underneath the shade of the Big Tree, flitting from one thing to the next or getting stuck on something big and grand, like the heat death of the universe, which she still thinks might be an issue but the sort of issue she can put up with later. Sometimes, she can breathe and feel the warmth of it huff out and over the length of her skin, and sometimes she feels alright. Sometimes her days go bad-good-bad-good-good, and that is a break in her pattern, but she still feels alright.

“We should go show this off,” Tanaka is saying (and she catches it all this time),”And I can grab you a drink or something from the vending machine. Probably not coffee though, because I think Suga would  _ kill  _ me if he knew I gave you more caffeine.”

She  _ had _ , in a blind panic at lunchtime, spent her next few days worth of snack money on two of the cheap cans of coffee (the less good, but just as vital Every Day Except Thursday Coffee) which she then drank in less than ten minutes, so that’s probably fair. In her defense, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“So are you ready to go back up then? I think Shouyou was askin’ about you, and afternoon practice starts in like ten minutes.”

Changing her name and moving to Switzerland had also felt like a possibility, so she won’t pretend that she was in the best state of mind. But  _ now  _ is not  _ then,  _ and right now her desire to throw her current life to the wolves is overruled by the contentment that’s settled around her ears, sealing her firmly into a happy bubble of standard practices and coffees consumed on their correct days in their correct places. The table isn’t all knotted wood and splinters waiting to happen- the color is gray but it’s easy on the eyes, and the patches of the ground that aren’t all dust and dirt are green with grass. The sky is blue. The breeze is blowing. Yachi Hitoka is nodding (again, and again) and packing up her things, assisted by one Tanaka Ryuunosuke and his nice hands and general niceness and indisputable artistic skills.

He looks proud of himself. He’s happy that he got her to laugh, she thinks. That’s very nice of him. He’s still being nice now- consistency is key because consistency precedes habit, and she loves habit because habit is consistent- by helping her tuck the pens and pencils back into her soft pink pencil case with a care much softer than his skin or his teeth or the fear of slipping through something by the skin of your teeth. He’s getting the order all wrong but the sentiment is sweet in a way that makes her swell and splinter with affection.

She’d help more but she’s half-indisposed at the moment; the piece of paper that Tanaka had scribbled on is clutched tightly in her hands, pale and stark against her skin, and she finds as they begin to move up and away from the old tree and the old picnic table, back up to the big, scary school and with her bag slung over Tanaka’s shoulder because he insisted, that she’s hit smack in the middle of her chest with a realization; this whole time, from when Tanaka made her laugh to now, she hasn’t felt  _ really  _ bad once. And from the self-satisfied sway of Tanaka next to her, from the way that his hands are jammed into his pockets and he no longer looks practiced at all, just easy and sharp, that’s exactly what he intended. And that’s- well that stirs up all sorts of strange feelings, deep in her stomach. But as they aren’t unpleasant, as they’re all warm and soft around the edges, as they don’t make her feel sick, Yachi just crosses her arms over her sketchbook (which  _ never  _ goes into the bag, just in case) and breathes in through her nose. 

Then out. Then in, then out, then in again, nice and slow. The wind tugs through her hair, the pages of her sketchbook ruffle, and Yachi Hitoka thinks that as she is in this moment-in  _ this _ one and no other- she is alright.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you made it this far!! I love hearing from you guys!!
> 
> Anyways Yachi/Tanaka is a friendship that I really think has a lot of potential, and I love writing anything with Yachi anyways (even if I did make her way more severe here than I would normally), so I gave it a shot. Tanaka’s great too- he’s very supportive of his friends and teammates and is just an all-around hard worker and good guy and you know what? Good for him


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